Reading Tea Leaves

Reading Tea Leaves

In the hazy air of the patchwork tent Cerce sits – an occult spider, perched in the shadows, seeking. The lamplit glow gently illuminates her thick arched brows. Her furrowed forehead layered with the weight of years and all the promised pasts, her ancient lips pursed in a Cleopatrian half-grimace... The teacup sits, too, the special tea all drunk, damp dank leaves ignored, lying in a tiny tangled map at the bottom of the cup.

           ‘And now, we begin...’ Cerce announces, as so many times before, her voice low and deep in the stillness of the tent.

           Across the blanket-covered table her client pauses. She is about to respond, but catching a gleam at the soothsayer’s good eye, she retreats within the hushed wonder of the moment.

          ‘I see, a face. It is a man, of maybe 60-70 years. He wears a beard. It is long... he has, only one eye!’

           ‘Oh – is it possible?’

           Cerce’s face ghastly etched in the soft glow of the crystal shows not a flicker of response. Her practiced mien redolent as a waxed wooden wode. The woman, wanting more, expecting more, leans forward, her freshly-painted nails scarlet, glistening, bathed in the same muted light – then; ‘Please, tell me...’  

           Marei is the client. An old woman whom life has left behind, seeking that which eludes us all - the truth, a reason, the reason for the breath, the effort, the continued try. She is a woman of singular stillness. She speaks with hands slicing hard the air into words, into boxes, with a voice of feathered dust. Alone now for many years; her life has been a waiting and a watching. Watching them grow, watching them die, the moments and the passing non-events – the compost and the soil, and the dusty dried arrangement left untouched in his room, left just as it was, undisturbed, a shrine to a lost... well, a loss of everything; everything lost. Such has Marei’s world become, even her sight fading like the flowers, as she sits with her store-bought nails, her thoughts of stone, her thoughts of the man she seeks to find again through the soothsayer’s visions.

    ‘This... man, you seek. What was he! What did he do? Did he work with his hands – a mason, of brick or...?’    

  ‘Yes. Well, he was a sculptor, of stone... granite. An artist.’

       ‘Yes, I see, the crystal shows a... a shape. It is not clear but it is there. It is... wait. It has, oh. It is dual!

       ‘What, I don’t understand?’    

       ‘Dual – it is the two, together in the one, firm. This man, is there – was there something about him...?’

       ‘He was my, my husband – before he disappeared.’

                                                                      .  .  .

They had met in the bush, two aloof hikers, strangers. Yet they connected, drawn together by awe and respect for all they saw and felt around them. He, strong, resolute – on the outside, but beneath lay a deeply hidden, wavering uncertainty, like an eel struggling in deep dark water, seeking shelter, a place to find. A way to find who he was really should it be.

          She, natural flotsam drifting along in the passing seasons, always destined a follower, but with an innate dignity and calm not to be denied.

           They came together, both arriving at the bottom rock pool at Morialta falls; the waters cascading in silver-white foam down from the laden cliffs above, the craggy hill top dotted with stringy-bark and thick layers of acacia studded with droplets like clear sequins from last night’s rain. They came together to cool themselves with the clear water. The dark swirling translucence bubbled beneath the emerald surface in huge, distended hoops, elongated liquid mirrors slow dancing timeless secrets of eddies and currents.

           ‘Oh, ah, “Hello!”’ from him, lips full, of life, of promise, bending his head to scoop streaming water through his long hair, his rough hands splashing liquid energy onto, over and into his thick, wiry beard, bending his head to avoid her bright piercing gaze that seemed to search his face, as they stood alone together beside the rock-shrouded pool.

           She seemed quite sure of the of apparent serendipity of it all (thinking… Just type of man I...) and so desire for this man surfaced as a warm flush, at her cheek, her throat, her breast.

           ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Marei asks, breaking her stare and surveying the scene like Vivien Leigh. He turns full toward her now, not two-arm-lengths from where she stands leaning into the moment, breathing-in the vista, the water beyond falling leisurely, noiselessly into the bold pool far beyond. He stands straightening, drips drip drip dripping from his matted beard onto the rubble under his sandalled feet.

‘Yes, you are - I mean it is! ... Isn’t it?’ The smile cracks his face open like the lips of an ancient sandstone clam.

           She shares his smile and her lips, purse and motile state, ‘I often come here.

                                         (The pause...).

           'Do you know, I once saw a tortoise... (his eyebrows raise) true! Just over there, by those boulders at the far edge of the pool. Just swimming quietly along he was, as though he was the only thing in the whole world... Like a god! Well, a god of his little part anyway – I remembered that I too would like to feel like that one day.’

           He ponders on her words, but doesn’t answer, just looks at her, her posture, her hair… then he thinks about the tortoise.

                                                 .  .  .

Cerce leans back into her old wicker chair and tilts her head, regarding Marei with a new understanding. ‘Tell me of this man,' she commands, her eyes hollow in the subdued glow emanating from the crystal.

           ‘Well, we were together since my daughter died... That was in 19.. We met at a rock pool. I told you he worked in stone, didn’t I?’

           A slow nod.

           ‘I, er, I lost him, you see – he left. Well, disappeared, actually...’ Marei looks past the mystic crouched before her into a time long past. ‘I don’t know why – that’s why I came to you. I was hoping...’

           Abruptly, unexpectedly, a slow fat brown moth appears and flutters automatically toward the lamp, then, with a lingering puff of grey dust bounces away, floating and dropping back to the darkness whence it came.

           ‘Oh, the Moth!’

                                                                       .  .  .  

‘Will you marry me?’ he had asked, his long legs stretched out upon the dusky beach. The legs of a woman, really, not a man’s; lithe, white as blanched asparagus, extending from shapely calf to thighs smooth and strong from swimming and climbing.

           The question was asked seriously, even though he could not bear to look to her face for an answer. In response, Marei sighed, rolled over on her towel, sat up with a small grunt, then gently brushed back a stray lock dangling down from her forehead. Then she leaned over and did the same for him, letting her fingers trail down in tiny circles, stroking his chest down slowly to the exposed navel, round and up again and then to rest, fluttering tips warm and waiting…

                                                 .  .  .  

The marriage ceremony was in a cave in Naracoorte, S.A., where the fossils haunt the darkness and time whispers the abrupt loneliness of the ages. She, dressed in floral buttercup frilled and flouncy; he, in new Akubra, stout boots and moleskins. What a pair; the diprotodon bones etched in their ghost-lit niches surely having never seen the like before. There were not many others present to witness the nuptials – just a few close friends and one or two relatives respectfully restless standing at the back of the circle and wondering in the strangeness of the whole affair.

           ‘I love your dress,’ he states, with an honesty suggesting a deeper inference.

           ‘Oh – thank you. I, I thought the colours would go well against the dust and the limestone…’ she replies, in an attempt at cave humour.

           And he really did love her dress. That was the funny thing, and perhaps the first indication everything was ‘not quite right’. The ‘Reception’, held at the Blue Lake Resort, went along, as they say, ‘swimmingly’, with the usual drunken slurred speeches denigrating the groom (in a nice way) and the praise and gushes of the admiring ladies in attendance commending the bravery of Madame Marei, in agreeing to ‘hook-up’ with such a Neanderthal. One guest’s recollection in particular drawing discrete guffaws from the men, regarding the groom’s cross-dressing attempts at one raucous party, where the groom had invertedly forgotten (apparently) to wear men’s underwear, so when it came to returning to his ‘proper’ gear, the audience were privy to a choice of lilac undies, instead of the expected boxers or jocks. The strange thing being his refusal to peel them off…

           Then, there was the make-up incident. Marei, returning unexpectedly from shopping (she had left her new credit card on the bureau) to find him naked, at her dressing table, fully made-up, experimenting with her blush and highlights… That was in the days when he remained clean-shaven.

           ‘Oh – I see you like the ‘Pretty-in-Puce’ highlighter, then?’

           ‘I, er…’

           Well, what could he say?

                                              .  .  .

Cerce nods again in understanding. ‘Yes, I see now how it was.’

           ‘But – you said, “dual”! What does it mean?’

           ‘It means both of man and woman – born as a man, but longing to be woman. Did you not know of this?’

           The question hovered in the thick, dim light of the tent, as painful as a regret waiting to drop and take hold.

           Then, Marei began to notice the details. With her poor vision she focussed now more carefully on Cerce’s outfit, her coarse blonde hair beneath the silken shawl, the hooked nose and thick eyebrows – and then, as if for the first time, she noticed the mystic’s hands were rough and strong, a man’s hands, a man who...

                                                  .  .  . 

One day, in a misplaced spirit of adventure, they decided to visit Uluru. He, wishing to experience Country and the timelessness of the ancients, to feel for himself with his own hands the wisdom lying waiting to be revealed in the stone. She, just to get away, to be with him. When they arrived, the Rock was steaming, streaming with fine rivulets sent by the rain to fall in flowing ribbons down the coarse-grained stone. Feldspar-speckled crevasses were alive with life-bringing water, which sluiced down to disappear at last into the greedy sand at the base of the monolith.

           ‘Well – we made it!’

           ‘Yes, we are here… Now what?’ she asked, shielding her eyes from the fading rays as the sunset haloed the Rock postcard pretty with a muted blood-orange fugue. A fresh fine sprinkling mist of rain began to fall, adding a further sense of mystery and drama to the effect.

           They disembarked the hired camper and stretched their legs, taking-in the site, the sight, the excitement of discovery and the realisation of the time-worn power laid out majestically before them. They had once again been brought together and united by their awareness and respect and awe for nature. That’s when it happened.

           Leaning down to brush away a bit of stick that had snagged onto his sock, he slipped in a muddy rut and fell heavily face-first onto a corner of the vehicle’s bullbar. The pitted metal bit into his eye like a snake, and as he dropped heavily to the ground, he was unable to hold back a guttural sob of pained surprise. The blood flowed in ochre drabs from the injured eye socket and seeped through his hand as he held it cupped and trembling over the fresh deep wound. Marei rushed to his side, helping him up onto his shaky legs as she guided him leaning, back into the camper.

           Ringing through to the Ranger’s office, they contacted an officer who promised to come to their aid. When he arrived, the flow of blood had been mostly staunched by a thick fold of hankies placed over the eye and held firmly in place by the still blood-covered hand. This is how he lost his eye and he never did get the chance to feel for himself the warm pores of antediluvian stone, or sense the hidden memories dream-sung by the ancients who remained deep and present and ever aware in the heart and soul of the ancient, immeasurably giant, solemn lump of rock. 

                                                   .  .  .

Marei now slowly stood. Her thin shadow throwing a wavering shade of menace over the upraised, surprised face of Cerce. ‘You – you… Reveal yourself to me!’

           Cerce, too, then slowly rose and she towered over the now hunching Marei; and with a hissing breath she/he spat the doom-filled truth out into the gloom of the tent. ‘Yes – it is “I” – your soul-mate long lost to you in heart and mind. I, as you see, am now woman – woman! As I should have always been! As I was destined to be…’ And with that, Cerce tore away the silk scarf and revealed her full face to a shocked Marei.

           And in the shadows, Marei stared, standing rigid as bones of stone before this impossible visage from a broken past. The man she had loved, had become the woman that now filled her with dread, and all she could do was stare, her mouth open, her mind in a whirl. Marei dropped her head and mouthed the words, “Why did I come here? What was I expecting? I should’ve known better…” – and it was just at that moment the fat brown moth chose to reappear, fluttering, manic, like a tiny demented Harpie, round and round inside the tent, a flapping sprite escaped from a Pandorian jar of fate and utter woe.

           They both watched stupefied, as the moth dropped unceremoniously into the empty teacup and then lay still amongst the dark dank leaves of sodden tea.

ends